Frühläuten, around 1840

CommentaryCarl Gustav Carus described ›Frühläuten‹ (Old German City in the First Light of Day) as a view of an »old German city in the first light of day when, between four and five, the bells are ringing and the choughs are flying round the towers.« The painting derives its atmospheric intensity from its telescoping of foreground and background. The river wending its way between the hills of the rolling countryside glimpsed beyond the rooftops can almost certainly be read as an allegory of the course of life. Thus, Carus, the Romantic who was influenced by Caspar David Friedrich between 1817 and 1827, helped usher in the more peaceable painting of early Biedermeier. Ever since 1772, when, at the sight of Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe was moved to pen his paean to German architecture, »Von deutscher Baukunst«, not only had Gothic architecture been held in increasingly high esteem, but it had become sacred German architecture par excellence and thus a central trope of German Romanticism.

Carl Gustav Carus described ›Frühläuten‹ (Old German City in the First Light of Day) as a view of an »old German city in the first light of day when, between four and five, the bells are ringing and the choughs are flying round the towers.« The painting derives its atmospheric intensity from its telescoping of foreground and background. The river wending its way between the hills of the rolling countryside glimpsed beyond the rooftops can almost certainly be read as an allegory of the course of life. Thus, Carus, the Romantic who was influenced by Caspar David Friedrich between 1817 and 1827, helped usher in the more peaceable painting of early Biedermeier. Ever since 1772, when, at the sight of Strasbourg Cathedral, Goethe was moved to pen his paean to German architecture, »Von deutscher Baukunst«, not only had Gothic architecture been held in increasingly high esteem, but it had become sacred German architecture par excellence and thus a central trope of German Romanticism.